I basically do exactly this, but I am running the reverse proxy on my home computer: the VPS is literally just acting as a proxy, for which I use wireguard to tunnel the connection. So far it’s worked great, though initial setup was a pain.

I had My minecraft server scanned by at least 3 different bots, and I even had some friendly guy join my server that apparently found it using a bot he wrote. I’m now using a whitelist lol. One of the account names that scanned my server was "Fifth Column, which is a griefing group.

Decibels seems to be an audio player to playback individual files, like maybe a voice memo or single music track. I personally use Gapless when I want to play music with shuffle and playlists.

With how easy it is to Massgrave to get a valid Windows key, I personally don’t even consider backing up windows keys lol.

I think it’s probably down to preference. I personally really like Fedora server because it comes pre-installed with the Cockpit webui which replaces the role of Portainer and makes other admin tasks like firewall openings and user management trivial. I’m definetly glad to have switched away from Ubuntu server which I was using before.

Hugo is also pretty cool.

Having a size cap does not make much sense since the increased pointer size is triggered intentionally, meaning if someone keeps shaking the pointer, they must want it bigger (whether for amusement or because they’re hella blind).

Filestash looks awesome! I tried the demo on my phone and it was way snappier than Nextcloud or even Google drive lol. I mostly use Nextcloud for documents and for calender and contacts, so I might replace nextcloud soon given how slow it usually is.

AMD processors also have worse video encoding compared to Intel, which matters for Jellyfin.

Have a look at the PostmarketOS device list. There are a ton of devices that boot, but the vast majority are missing critical features that render the device almost useless for anything but a server. The only android phones that I know of that run well with usable features and performance are the Oneplus 6/6T, Poco f1, Pixel 3a, shift6mq and fairphone, though even then there are crucial features missing. A modern phone built for Linux with a modern chipset, working camera, USB and sound would be awesome, but such a device does not exist AFAIK.

Just btw, your requirements for the website would work just fine on a static site. A static site just means the server only serves the website and nothing else. No DBs or anything like that.

I switched over to Zoho as well recently. While there are some upsells, they are usually reasonable enough. I also occasionally use their other services like writer, notes, and calendar which is nice.

But also, there are significant potential savings and advantages for data storage at home.

The learning aspect is the big one for me. If you need a reliable service with no time spent learning or troubleshooting, you’re probably better using a paid service.

Bitwarden does exactly that. It will mostly work with no server connection.

This is exactly what I do. I find Portainer to be nice for getting an overview of my containers that are all created using docker-compose.

Discord is also quite the resource hog. Trying to run the web version on weaker phones is a slog.

Depending on the use, you may be able to spin then down when not in use, but that’s not always possible for some applications.

I know for me personally, its worth the time to set things up myself since I usually learn something new along the way. If you don’t care about the learning aspect and just want the finished product, paying someone else is probably a good idea.

I bought a small APC UPS about a year ago and am glad I did. In my area, very brief outages are somewhat common so a small UPS will work for the majority of outages.